Online Casinos Getting Beat By Bots

27th November 2009

“The latest issue for online gambling sites is the use of bots disguised as regular players to foresee odds. According to a report by SC magazine, an online publication for Internet technology security experts, hackers have begun using bots to mine information from online casinos revealing patterns in payouts.

Using the information that has been gathered with web-scraping techniques, scammers can compute through arbitration systems when bets are more likely to win. The bots are hard to track or prevent by casino security because they run off scripts set to simulate live gambler play.

Guri Geva, regional director for Radware at Israel, Northern Europe and the United Kingdom, says, “The hacker can use the bot to manipulate the odds to improve the winning margin; it can also measure times so it can hit the site when it is at its busiest, going as undetected as possible.”

Geva recommends sites prepare for hacker attacks by employing software that analyzes user behavior in transparent real time. He sees the number and complexity of attacks only growing, as estimates are that the online casino industry will generate $125 billion by 2015.

The security adviser stated, “Webscraping is going on all of the time; it can steal information from a website, put the details on to another and redirect people to it. This can lead to fraud and even phishing, you could blacklist IP addresses but that will require a lot of time.”“